Reception Theory

Reception Theory

• Stewart Hall come up with the reception theory in the 1970's.
• Hall says that the text does not have a meaning, and that it potentially has many meanings. Each has a particular meaning for a certain person, for example culture, gender, social status, religion etc.
• This theory is not all about the audience, as there is 2 parts to the process: encoding and decoding.
• Someone who creates a text encode what they want it to mean - how they dress, their actions, how they speak etc.
• The audience decode the meaning, they interpret for example the camera angles.
• The audience may see the text differently to how the creator wants them to encode it, and this gives power to the audience and the creator.
• There are three basic readings we can decode which include:
• The dominant reading - which is the way most people will understand the text and this fits into the original meaning.
• The negotiated reading - which is basically seen in the same way as the dominant reading, but because of something particular about someone, they see it in a slightly different way.
• The oppositional meaning - which is taken in a completely different way for example a strongly feminist reading of a film.